The Eye of the Falcon (2 page)

H
ylas could see snow on the mountains, and here on the coast the wind was freezing, but the cold didn't bother the lumpy little creature squatting in front of him. It was about knee height and made of dirty wax, with hair of moldy straw and fierce red pebble eyes.

Periphas had warned him about these as he was leaving. “They're Plague traps, they draw it away from the living. People call them pus-eaters. Make sure you don't touch.”

As Hylas edged past the pus-eater, he felt an ache in his temple, and rubbed the scar from the burn he'd received on Thalakrea. The ache faded, but from the corner of his eye, he glimpsed dark specks crawling all over the pus-eater. He'd seen the same black swarm on the ghostly children. Was it Plague? Periphas hadn't said anything about being able to
see
it, so how could this be?

And how was it possible that he was seeing ghosts?

There was no one to ask. He hadn't met anyone all day, either living or dead. To his right, the gray Sea sucked at the shore, and to his left, low gray hills barred the way inland. Halfway up, a dark band of wreckage was a grim reminder of the Sea's attack.

Periphas had told him that if he followed the coast west for a day or so, then headed inland, he would reach the House of the Goddess, where Pirra's mother ruled. “Although who knows what you'll find. There used to be villages and ship-sheds all along this coast. Where we're standing used to be a town.”

“What's a town?” Hylas had asked.

“Like a village, but bigger. Thousands of people.”

“ Thousands?”

“Keftiu is vast, Hylas, it takes two days to sail from one end to the other. Even if your friends are still alive, how will you find them?”

That had only been this morning, but already Periphas seemed long gone. Hylas felt lonely, vulnerable, and
cold
. He wished he had something warmer than a sheepskin jerkin whose sleeves were too short, and leggings with holes in the knees.

Up ahead, he saw smoke rising from behind a spur. Drawing his knife, he crept forward and peered around a boulder.

He blinked in disbelief.

Below him at the head of a bay clustered several makeshift huts with people bustling about in between, oblivious to the desolation. Some stirred huge steaming cauldrons; others bent over stone vats cut into the hillside, or unloaded dripping baskets from boats in the shallows. Even more bizarre, women stood at drying racks, hanging up sodden armfuls of astonishing colored wool. Scarlet, yellow, blue, purple: The brilliant clots of color seemed to throb in the grayness all around.

The wind gusted in Hylas' face, and he inhaled an eye-watering stench of urine and rotting fish. In astonishment, he realized that these people must be dye-workers. But why would anyone bother to dye wool in a Plague?

He was debating whether to go down and seek shelter or avoid them altogether, when a stone struck the boulder near his head. He spun around—guessed it was a trick—flung himself sideways. Too late. A noose yanked tight around his neck, his knife was kicked from his hand, and spears pinned him front and back.

“I
told
you, I'm not a thief!” shouted Hylas.

His captors yelled at him in Keftian, brandishing fishing spears and big double axes of tarnished bronze. There were ten of them: squat beardless men in ragged sheepskin tunics baring muscular limbs stained a weird, blotchy purple. Their faces were purple too, and they stank of urine and rotting fish. Hylas had never seen anything like them.

One man hooked Hylas' axe from his belt, then they hauled and pushed him down to the huts, keeping him at a distance with their spears, for fear of Plague.

Still yelling in their strange bird-like speech, they halted at the largest hut, and an old woman appeared in the doorway: Hylas guessed she was the headwoman of the village. She was enormously fat, and swathed in layers of filthy gray rags. She had a spongy purple face crowned with a few greasy threads of hair. One eye socket was empty, the other eye was a cloudy gray. It skittered about alarmingly, then fastened on Hylas and gave him a hard stare.

One of the men pointed to the tattoo on Hylas' forearm: the black zigzag that marked him as a slave of the Crows. Over the winter, he'd tattooed a line underneath, to turn it into a longbow. That didn't seem to fool the old woman.

“What's a Crow spy doing here?” she rasped in Akean.

“I'm not a Crow,” panted Hylas, “and I'm not a spy, I—”

“We drown Crow spies. We feed them to the sea snails.”

“I
hate
the Crows! I'm just trying to find my friend! Her name's Pirra, she's the daughter of High Priestess Yassassara.”

The woman snorted. “As if she'd be friends with the likes of you.” Barking a command in Keftian, she jerked her head, and the men began to drag Hylas toward the Sea.

“I can prove it!” he shouted. “Pirra grew up in the House of the Goddess, she told me it's huge and—they do rites with men jumping over charging bulls—”

“Everyone knows that,” sneered the woman.

They were hauling him over stinking mounds of crushed sea snails, past conical baskets baited with rotting fish. Was that how he was going to end up? As bait?

“Pirra hated the House of the Goddess,” he shouted over his shoulder, “she called it her stone prison! Then her mother tried to strike a bargain with the Crows, she was going to seal it by giving Pirra in marriage—but Pirra burned her own face to spoil the match! She—she's got a scar like a crescent moon on her cheek—”

“Everyone knows that too,” called the woman.

“You can't
do
this!” he yelled. “I'm a stranger here, it's against the law of the gods to kill a stranger!”

“The gods have abandoned Keftiu,” snarled the woman. “Around here,
I
make the law!”

Now they were dragging him into the freezing shallows and kicking him to his knees. Icy waves stung his face. The tines of a pitchfork enclosed his neck, forcing him toward the water . . .

Something Pirra had said came back to him. “She had a tunic of Keftian purple!” he blurted out. “She said they make the purple from mashed-up sea snails, thousands of them, and it costs more than gold!”

The woman barked a command, and the pressure on his neck lifted. Panting, he lurched to his feet.

“Quite a few people know that too,” the woman called drily. “You'll have to do better if you want to live.”

“She—um—once she told me there were only two robes like it in all Keftiu,” he gasped, “but nobody's ever seen the other because it's Yassassara's, they made it in secret, she only wears it for secret rites.”

Silence. The gray Sea lapped hungrily at his thighs.

“I dyed that wool myself,” said the woman. “By moonlight. In secret. Now, how'd you know that?”

“Like I said, Pirra told me!”

Another command—and Hylas was hauled back to the shore. The noose was removed, the spears withdrawn. Someone chucked him his axe and his knife.

The old woman hawked and spat a gobbet of purple snot on the stones. Then she turned and lumbered back into her hut. “Yassassara's dead,” she said over her shoulder.

Hylas flinched. “What about Pirra?”

“You better come inside.”

T
he lion cub heard ravens calling from the ridge and quickened her pace. Ravens meant carcasses, and she was hungry.

The Bright Soft Cold lay deep on the mountain, and by the time she'd struggled onto the ridge, the ravens had left only bones. The cub crunched them up, but the hunger didn't go away.

The cub was always hungry. Long ago, men had brought her to this horrible land of shadows and ghosts. She remembered fleeing in terror as the Great Gray Beast came roaring in and savaged the shore. Afterward, there had been piles of carcasses—dogs, sheep, goats, fish, humans—and swarms of vultures. The lion cub had fought for her share, until men had chased her away with their great shiny claws.

She'd fled to the mountain, because she
knew
mountains, but this was nothing like the fiery Mountain where she'd lived with her pride.
There were no lions,
only frozen trees and Bright Soft Cold; hungry creatures, ragged men, and ghosts.

It was a land of shadows. When the cub sat on her haunches and gazed at the Up, she couldn't see the Great Lion whose mane shone golden in the Light and silver in the Dark. And there was no real Light, only this gray not-Light, in between the Darks.

The cub had grown used to the not-Light, as it helped her hide from men; but as the Darks and the not-Lights passed, the cold bit harder. Her breath turned to smoke, and she couldn't find any wet to drink, so she ate the Bright Soft Cold. She learned to crawl into caves when the white wind howled, and her pelt grew thick and matted with filth. It kept her warm, but she was too hungry and frightened to lick herself clean.

Then, alarmingly, her teeth started falling out. She was horrified, until new ones thrust painfully through. They were larger and stronger than the old ones: She could rip open a frozen carcass with one bite. And she got bigger. Now when she stood on her hind legs to scratch a tree, her forepaws reached much higher than before.

Here on the mountain, there weren't as many dead things as on the shore, so as well as scavenging, the cub tried to hunt. Mostly she did it wrong, charging too soon, or getting confused about which prey to chase; but
finally
she felled a squirrel with a lucky swipe. It was her first kill. If only there'd been someone with her, to see.

That was the worst of it, the loneliness. Sometimes the cub sat and mewed her misery to the Up. She longed for warmth and muzzle-rubs—and to sleep without fear, because other ears and noses were keeping watch.

A jay cawed to its mate, and from high on the ridge came the squawks of vultures. The lion cub struggled toward them through the Bright Soft Cold.

The vultures were squabbling over a dead roebuck. The cub wasn't yet able to roar, so she rushed at them, snarling as loud as she could and lashing out with her claws. It was good to see the vultures flying off in a clatter of wings; and the buck was still warm. Tearing open its belly, the cub hunkered down to feed.

She'd hardly gulped a mouthful when two men burst from the trees, shouting and waving big shiny claws.

The cub fled: down a gully and up some rocks,
anywhere,
as long as she got away. She didn't stop until she could no longer smell that horrible man-stink.

The lion cub hated and feared all men. It was
men,
with their terrible flapping hides and their savage dogs, who had killed her mother and father when she was little. It was
men
who had brought her across the Great Gray Beast to this freezing land of ghosts.

It hadn't always been like this. Long ago when she was small, there had been a boy. She'd had a thorn in her pad, and he'd pulled it out with his thin clever forepaws, then smeared on some healing mud. The boy had looked after the cub and given her meat. She remembered his calm strong voice, and the warmth of his smooth, furless flanks. She remembered his ridiculously long sleeps, and how cross he would get when she jumped on his chest to wake him.

There'd been a girl too. She'd been kind to the cub (except when the cub struck at her ankles to trip her up). For a few Lights and Darks, they'd been a pride together: boy, girl, and cub. They'd been happy. The cub remembered uproarious games of play-hunt, and the humans' yelping laughs when she pounced. She remembered a magic ball of sticks that could fly without wings, and race downhill without any legs. She remembered much meat and muzzle-rubbing and warmth . . .

A clump of Bright Soft Cold slid off a branch and spattered the cub. Wearily, she shook it off.

It hurt to remember the boy, because he was the one who had sent her here to this horrible place. He had abandoned her.

The lion cub snuffed the air, then plodded on between the cold unfeeling trees.

She would never trust another human. Not ever again.